A new architecture for multicasting live IPTV traffic in ethernet passive optical network

Internet protocol TV (IPTV) is one of the important multimedia applications for the next-generation network. IPTV can provide triple play services that require high-speed access networks with the functions of multicasting and Quality-of-Services (QoS) guarantee to provide attractive services. In the access networks, Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is regarded as one of the best solutions to meet the higher bandwidth demands. In this paper, we propose a new multicasting mechanism for IPTV in EPON by assigning a unique logical link identifier (LLID) to each IPTV channel requested by users. In our architecture, three tables in optical line terminal (OLT) and optical network units (ONU) are constructed in the reconciliation sub-layer (RS) of ONUs and OLT to handle the IPTV requests. Traffic classifier and IPTV controller components are introduced in the proposed architecture to handle the live IPTV request. Simulation results have shown that our proposed mechanism can improve the QoS metrics in terms of bandwidth consumption, packet loss, and queue length.